This much we do know: TweetDeck got taken offline by its parent Twitter today. Hardly earthshaking news by itself. But was there also a security breach that granted unauthorized access to other people's accounts?

TweetDeck is currently down while we look into an issue. Apologies for the inconvenience.

TechCrunch pointed to an Australian user named Geoff Evason who claimed he was able to get into hundreds of Twitter and Facebook accounts through the Mac client app for TweetDeck. The guy also put up a screenshot purportedly of some of the accounts he allegedly got into.

"I'm a Tweetdeck user. A bug has given me access to hundreds of Twitter and Facebook accounts through Tweetdeck. I didn't do anything special to make this happen," Evason e-mailed TechCrunch. "I just logged in one day, the account was slower than normal, and I could post from many more accounts."

CNET subsequently reached Evason by e-mail:

"I wasn't exploiting a flaw I found. I just opened Tweetdeck and had access to all those accounts. I tweeted a 'test' tweet from another account just to see if the problem was as serious as it looked."

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Charles Cooper was an executive editor at CNET News. He has covered technology and business for more than 25 years, working at CBSNews.com, the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet.
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